Wordy Birds

Abigail Adams

Original airdate: December 11, 2009

“For generations, Abigail Adams’s words — in particular her famous “Remember the Ladies” letter of March 31, 1776 — have inspired women seeking equity in the workplace, before the law, and within their own families. Yet they have always been mere words, and skeptics have emphasized that the only place she ever dared to utter them was in confidential letters to her husband. But the skeptics are wrong.”

- from Abigail Adams

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A Fortunate Age

Original airdate: December 4, 2009

“But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do with money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents and aunts and uncles, all of whom were, inevitably, doctors or lawyers or businessmen or sometimes teachers, and none of whom had read Sentimental Education or could identify the term “deconstruction” or made regular visits to the theater, except, perhaps, to see musicals or Neil Simon comedies. They — the adults — were too corrupted, too swayed and jaded by the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood, by the banal labyrinths of health insurance and Roth IRAs, by the relative safety of Volvo versus Saab versus Subaru, or flat Scottish cashmere versus the newer, softer, fluffier — but possibly less durable — stuff, imported from Nepal, that Neiman’s is carrying lately.”

- from A Fortunate Age

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Stalin Thought of You

Original airdate: October 23, 2009

Director Kevin McNeer talks about his documentary, “Stalin Thought of You.”

From stalinthoughtofyou.com:

“By the time he passed away in 2008 at the age of 109, Boris Efimov’s pen had churned out political cartoons for the Soviet press on just about every world event in the past hundred years. Whether in WWII, when Russia faced annihilation by the Nazis – who had orders to hang Efimov on sight – or during the super-power days of the Cold War, Efimov always had an inexhaustible supply of images and jokes to deploy against the enemy. His list of satirical casualties ranges from the Tsar to George Bush.   But behind his titanic career, his charm and his wit, is what Efimov calls “a wound that does not heal”: the execution of his older brother Mikhail Koltsov. The ambitious Koltsov was a famous journalist, pal of Earnest Hemingway, and a Soviet spy, but he always looked out for his younger brother Boris, who to his dying day worked and slept under his older brother’s portrait. The keys to Koltsov‘s fate and Efimov’s contradictory attitude toward it are bound up in their complex relationship with Stalin.  Efimov’s words, drawings and animated films are interwoven with rarely seen footage from the Russian State Film Archives in a kaleidoscopic stroll through the darker side of the 20th century.”

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Vol 1 & 2

Original airdate: October 16, 2009

“The men who raised me were lords of matter, and in the dim chambers I watched as they traced the spinning of bodies celestial in vast, iron courses, and bid sparks to dance upon their hands; they read the bodies of fish as if each dying trout or shad was a fresh Biblical Testament, the wet and twitching volume of a new-born Pentateuch. They burned holes in the air, wrote poems of love, sucked the venom from sores, painted landscapes of gloom, and made metal sing; they dissected fire like newts.”

- from The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Original airdate: September 11, 2009

“The world watched in horror in April 2007 when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho went on a killing rampage that resulted in the deaths of thirty-two students and faculty members before he ended his own life.

Former Virginia Tech English department chair and distinguished professor Lucinda Roy saw the tragedy unfold on the TV screen in her home and had a terrible realization. Cho was the student she had struggled to get to know–the loner who found speech torturous. After he had been formally asked to leave a poetry class in which he had shared incendiary work that seemed directed at his classmates and teacher, Roy began the difficult task of working one-on-one with him in a poetry tutorial. During those months, a year and a half before the massacre, Roy came to realize that Cho was more than just a disgruntled young adult experimenting with poetic license; he was, in her opinion, seriously depressed and in urgent need of intervention.” – randomhouse.com

Listen to the show:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.